


Suradanna and the Sea of Stars

by DeCarabas



Category: Suradanna and the Sea - Rebecca Fraimow
Genre: F/F, Immortals in Space, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 13:25:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13054884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeCarabas/pseuds/DeCarabas
Summary: Change is a constant, like the seasons and the tides.





	Suradanna and the Sea of Stars

**Author's Note:**

  * For [vass](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vass/gifts).



She meets Suradanna at her favorite café on the station. It overlooks the docking bay. A floor-to-ceiling window so diners can watch the ships come and go, the golden sails of light against the stars. Their server recognizes her, calls her captain when she sits down, and it feels like a lifetime since she’s been called that.

“A lifetime or twelve,” Suradanna agrees, grinning at her across the table. She’s probably been counting.

And if the server thinks that a strange thing to say, he’s too polite to give any sign. More likely he didn’t give it a second thought. He just smiles at them with blue-tinted teeth as he sets a bottle of wine on the table, dips his head in what would have been a bow from the waist a generation ago. She’s not sure what fad causes the blue. Suradanna would be able to tell her if she were to ask, she feels sure.

It’s nice, saying exactly what they mean and letting any listener take it for some kind of private joke. She gets tired of lies, of makeup and dyes and illusions of age. Never had the patience to keep up with it for very long. And there’s another private joke to be made there, that patience is one thing she, of all people, should have in abundance.

But she has a real ship registered to her fake name, shining and new and legal, or close enough to legal as to make no difference thanks to the resources of Suradan Exports, and she’s itching to be underway.

* * *

On this ship, Suradanna sleeps through the night beside her.

Its hull is no more indestructible than that of the _Dolphin Breathes Fire_ , and Suradanna’s ledgers hold enough lost ships just like this one to prove it, and if something goes wrong this time they won’t be washing up on any island shore. But the floor under their feet feels as motionless as that of the station.

And when Suradanna does wake, a panel at their bedside lets her call the ship’s AI with a word, or fill the screen with a host of measurements—weights and temperatures and time and distance, tangible indications that all is as it should be, all is under control, as much as anything can ever be.

A ship is not a constant, and nothing is guaranteed to last, and the captain doesn’t plan on forgetting that. But mechanical parts that age can be replaced. And there’s an ancient fire-ship still docked at a port that used to be named Salamadan, restored and preserved as a floating history museum.

And the captain listens to Suradanna hum to herself, bending over a table covered in scattered papers and glowing screens, and the ship hums along with her tune, and the sound is soothing.

* * *

There are no tides, no rainy seasons to make the passage of time feel real. Snow and heat, yes, at one port or another, and more of either than she’d ever seen before, but all out of sequence. But one cycle in her life remains the same: she and Suradanna come together, they part, and they come together again.

* * *

Suradanna spends a few years planetside after closing down her oldest office. It’s no longer worth it to have her ships navigate through the space junk, the debris of abandoned satellites choking the planet as thoroughly as any plant in zuiran-saturated waters. More practical to dock at the station and let the elevator do all the work, even with the fees, until the cleanup efforts manage to make more of a dent in the problem. But all change brings new opportunities.

And though Suradanna’s picked out new sets of official papers with new names and new birthdates for them both, the captain isn’t ready to be something other than a captain again. Not just yet. Perhaps in their next life.

The ship is quieter while Suradanna is away, chasing those opportunities down.

* * *

The ship’s archives hold music going back to the dawn of recording. Even some old sea shanties. And her artificial crew doesn’t need work songs to keep in rhythm, hauling on lines that her ship doesn’t have, but the ship sings along with her all the same, to both the old songs and the new.

Suradanna makes sure she has no shortage of new songs to listen to.

She sends a video of a man singing to a small and crowded room, low and guttural, closing his eyes and swaying to a syncopated rhythm. And the captain’s smiling to herself as she reads the accompanying message, types a quick response.

_Planning on going into the music business now?_

Suradanna the producer. She could picture it easily. _  
_

_Maybe,_ comes the reply. And then, _Good music is timeless._

But that’s not true. Those old recordings of shanties have something of a museum quality about them, like that fire-ship, removed from their original context and not quite the same because of it.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Suradanna doesn’t decide to go into the music business, at least not for this particular lifetime. But the ship sails to the sound of the songs she sends.

* * *

She fingers a gossamer scarf hanging in a market stall, deep purple shot through with threads of silver, and thinks of the sometimes color of Suradanna’s hair, thinks of a very young Suradanna washing old age lines off her face like she was putting aside her armor.

The captain’s packing the scarf into her satchel when the video call comes in.

 _I miss you_ , Suradanna’s image says, blurring and sharpening again over a poor connection, her words out of sync with the movements of her lips. _I want to see you._ And then, _I mean it. I want to_ really _see you._

* * *

She wraps that scarf around Suradanna’s shoulders, warm under her hands. Swaying together on the floor of their ship to the sound of the music Suradanna had collected while they were apart, humming against her lips. Stowing Suradanna's chest where it belongs.

Tides go in, tides go out, and Suradanna is something to come back to, somewhere to come home to.


End file.
